Topics on my particular interests.
I’ve been against wide-spread spy cameras on privacy principles, ever since I heard about plans for them a few years ago. Now it seems that my concerns are unfounded… there’s no incentive to install them in any new cities, and the existing ones will probably scrap them soon, as they discover the same thing.
It will be interesting to see how this develops over time.
By the end of this decade or the next, “regenerative medicine” could well be commonplace. Dr. Who, eat your heart(s) out. 😉
Damned genes and their liberal agenda. For political reasons they refuse to justify the conservatives’ assertion that they’re just better than everybody else.
We space/science/SF geeks have always hoped that something like this would be the case, but we didn’t know what to expect. It looks like a second of the variables in the calculation of the odds of intelligent civilizations in the universe that we could communicate with (the Drake Equation) has been solved… only four more …
Continue reading ‘“Alien Earthlike worlds ‘like grains of sand’, say ‘wobble’ boffins”’ »
I’ve talked about compact fluorescent lights before, and (in the comments) about LED lights. Apparently LEDs are getting really good now… CF lights may turn out to be really short-lived.
I’ve mentioned the problem before, about three years ago: the platinum/iridium cylinder in France that is the official reference for the kilogram is losing weight, for reasons that currently baffle science. Any reference object is useless if it can’t be relied on to stay the same, so the science community is making a determined effort …
Continue reading ‘“Boffins mount campaign against France’s official kilogramme”’ »
A delightfully contradictory juxtaposition. GoddessJ is a science wonk who collects Tarot decks, one of these would make a perfect Christmas gift for her.
Un-freakin-believable. What’s the saying, that people always underestimate technological progress in the short term, and overestimate it in the long term? It’s true… ten years ago I’d have said this couldn’t happen in less than twenty years. (Oddly enough, I’ve never read any SF stories that incorporated credit cards at all, even technologically advanced ones …
I’d like to take this opportunity to remind children — and their parents — that Harry Potter and Hedwig are fictional characters, living in a fictional world, and that in the real world, owls do not make good pets. And if you want to sacrifice something, how about your tobacco habit? That would be good …
Continue reading ‘“Declining Indian owl population blamed on Harry Potter fans”’ »